“Greed and Stupidity” is the title of an article about the current economic crisis by David Brooks of the New York Times. David Brooks has become a favorite of ours; we find him sensible, balanced and devoid of dogmatism that seems to be the bane of many Newspaper opinionators. (see http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/03/opinion/03brooks.html?_r=1 ) In this article, Brooks discusses reasons for the…
Last week, the Pashtun Taliban attacked a Police Academy near Lahore. The attackers issued no demands but went on a rampage, killing at least eight recruits & instructors and wounding more than 100 others. One attacker was killed in the siege that followed and, in a gory finale, three detonated suicide belts, killing themselves. “They were barbaric,” a senior trainer…
Editor’s Note: Last week, we published our article titled “Do Wolves Attack Sheep?” (see https://cinemarasik.com/2009/03/28/do-wolves-attack-sheep.aspx ). Below are comments from one of our readers in Mumbai about this article. The reader chooses to remain anonymous.Comments From A Reader In Mumbai The India Pakistan situation: and the question – why does India not retaliate strongly against Pakistan? The straightforward…
Most of our readers are not likely to know that last week featured a five day military encounter between the Indian Army and the commandos of the Pakistani quasi-military organization Lashkar-e-Toiba. This is the same organization that attacked Mumbai in November 2008 killing several hundred innocent civilians. The encounter took place in the thick forests…
On Thursday, March 26, 2009, Mr. Joe Terranova made an “expert” appearance on CNBC’s Fast Money Show to discuss “Trading China’s Stimulus”. He quickly launched into his favorite topic, US Treasuries. He actually suggested on American National TV that the US Federal Reserve was following the lead of Chinese Government in buying the same maturities of US Treasuries…
The past few weeks have been full of intense media coverage of China, its comments about the US Dollar, its holdings of US Treasuries, its domestic stimulus and the recent naval incident between the Chinese & US Navies in the South China Sea.We shall try to cover these issues in this article. A detailed article…
AIG CEO Edward Liddy received a brutal lashing by a Congressional Committee last week. It was sheer torture to watch. Every Congressman on that committee decided to express his or her utter outrage for the camera and create sound bites to be used for the reelection campaign. Watching this spectacle unfold, we began imagining a…
It was such a pleasant surprise to see the great Jon Stewart invite Nandan Nilekani on his show. After all, who expected Jon Stewart to have heard of Nandan or his company InfoSys. But then the mystery was cleared up.Jon asked Nandan about his friendship with Tom Friedman of the New York Times. Ah! No wonder Jon…
Our first article about Ben Bernanke on this blog was titled “Jim Cramer on Ben Bernanke – Fair in August 2007 and Unfair in August 2008” ( https://cinemarasik.com/2008/08/01/jim-cramer-on-ben-bernanke—fair-in-august-2007-and-unfair-in-august-2008.aspx%C2%A0 ).In that article, we coined the term “Mo-Force” to describe the (then) enormous, gigantic pool of capital in the hands of short-term, performance-oriented investors or commonly called the…
The Taylor Rule, proposed first by economist John Taylor in 1993, is a monetary policy formula (or rule) that stipulates how much the Federal Reserve Bank should change its federal funds rate in response to GDP (gross domestic product) and inflation. For example, if inflation were to rise by 1%, the proper Taylor Rule response would be…